Wolfgang Streeck

Independent activity 1946.10.27.–

German economic sociologist who read the euro crisis as a clash between two sovereigns, the people and the markets

Born just outside Münster, Streeck studied sociology at Goethe University Frankfurt and Columbia University, taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and was director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne from 1995 to 2014. His early work on industrial relations and the "German model" gave way after 2008 to a critical macrosociology of the tension between capitalist markets and democratic politics. In Buying Time (2013) he argued that the post-war state had deferred crisis successively through inflation, public debt and private debt, and that in the conflict between the national citizenry (Staatsvolk) and international creditors (Marktvolk) the 2008 crisis marked the victory of the markets.